You are partially correct..... but you have made an over-generalized claim.
A CORRECTIBLE error, once corrected, is simply no longer an error.... so it will not be audible at all (because it is simply no longer there).
However, an UNCORRECTIBLE error, or a series of uncorrectible errors, which are filled in by interpolation, may be audible as a tick or pop, or as a skip, or as increased distortion of some sort.
(This is moot in "a properly functioning CD player" - because there will be no uncorrectible errors.)
USUALLY, on CD players with analog outputs, interpolation is only applied to data on its way to the analog outputs, on the copy of the data being sent to the DAC, and is NOT applied to data sent to the digital output.
So, USUALLY, if you were to play discs with progressively larger numbers of uncorrectible errors.....
- If you're listening to the analog outputs of an audio CD player, interpolation correction of a few minor errors may in fact be inaudible, so you may initially hear nothing.
Then as the number and size of the errors increase, they will progress from barely audible distortion, to occasional ticks and pops, to solid skips, and finally to a fault when the drive is no longer able to track the disc.
- If you have the DIGITAL output of that CD player connected to a DAC, all of the uncorrectble errors will be output to the DAC (becaus interpolation is not applied to the digital output).
In that situation, what you hear will depend on how the particular DAC you're using handles flawed or corrupted data.
Some DACs may tolerate it without major errors; others will have an audible dropout while they resynchronize to the data stream; and some may simply stop working with an error message.
- Note that, on MOST computer drives, and with MOST computer software, even a single uncorrectible error will cause the player to stop entirely, and report a "bad disc".
(Most computer programs are designed to handle both audio and digital data discs - and are configured not to tolerate even a single uncorrectoble error in the data.)
(It actually requires specialized software if you want a data drive to make multiple attempts to read flawed data - or to continue reading once an error has been encountered.)
NOTE that everything I said applies to standard designs that follow the Red Book CD standard... and more or less standard design practices.
In the past there have been cases of custom-designed audio CD transports, with their own custom-written software, that did not follow the standards...
In at least one of those cases, the designer wrote his own software, which neglected to apply the standard error correction, and resulted in excessive correctible (but uncorrected) errors...
And, in one or two others, the designer wrote software that
intentionally altered the data in an
attempt to improve it...
(There was one where the designer replaced the complex but perfectly effective error-correction algorithms specified by the standard with simpler ones which he insisted "sounded better".... )
This complexity is one of the reasons why many of us prefer to record and play back music directly from digital files.
(With digital files, it is relatively simple to use checksums and cryptographic signatures to ensure that the data remains perfect and unaltered, and so avoid any ambiguity about errors and error correction.)
lol. I don't think you understand how ridiculous this is. Does the laser impart a force on the CD greater than something measured in femtonewtons? I just don't understand why you're here. "Demoing" a product is not the same as testing it. I'd bet every penny I make for the rest of my life that a CD mat does absolutely nothing to the signal in an already functioning CD player. Plus, read errors don't manifest themselves as "less bass" or "too much treble" or god forbid "narrow soundstage", they manifest as skips or pops.
